Low Cost Additional Storage Option For Exacq Server?

Undisclosed Integrator #1

I am looking to add storage onto 2 servers running Exacqvision. I can't add anymore on board and looking for something that will be seen as a drive letter in Exacq to write to. Looking for about 8 TB to be shared between them or 4TB slices for each. Anybody use anything sucessfully in the past that's simple to setup?

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Undisclosed Integrator #2

Everyone looks for a low cost alternative, but they still want it to be reliable and effective.

What you want is a something that has at least two ISCSI capable ports available to share between the two recorders, then you would divide the drives or the LUNS between the two. Or you could connect everything through a switch, then you only need one ISCSI port. Then as long as your Exacq servers have Windows, or if Linux verify they have ISCSI connection software, you should be good.

There's a lot of bad feedback about Iomega. Maybe look at Netgear. They have a 5 year warranty and their tech support tends to be helpful for the most part. But it's still business-near-consumer-grade solution. If you want to trade high performance for cost, that might be worth a look.

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Matt Ion

The easiest and cheapest option is to slap a 4TB external USB drive on each box. That doesn't give you any kind of redundancy or reliability, but it's effective. There are also some that accept two disks that can be configured as a mirrored RAID, and connect via USB.

Other than that, among low-cost NAS units, I'd recommend giving Synology a look - I'm using a DS-412+ at home and love it. Load it (or the latest equivalent) up with four 4TB drives, create a RAID6 array (or use "Synology Hybrid RAID with two disk redundancy"), and that will give you approximately 8TB total... then just create one iSCSI target with two 4TB LUNs, and you're off to the races.

NOTE: you don't need two iSCSI ports if you're connecting everything via a decent gigabit switch. The only benefit to having two is if you're connecting each directly to the NVR... which would mean a second NIC in the NVR dedicated to the iSCSI connection.

The other option is to use an older PC as a homebrew NAS using FreeNAS - that's likely the cheapest route, but far from the easiest.

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Mike Dotson

The company I work for (Seneca) has solutions in this space so I reached out to our storage architect for his comments which I pasted below.

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If he wants down and dirty then check out the Xvos Lite desktop. XV-VMDT35. Today our entry rack product is the XV-UM2U35 with five 2TB drives in RAID5.

As is the case with all add-ons. You really want to double check the total camera bandwidth. The IP SAN should be isolated from the management, viewing and camera LANs. Depending on the bandwidth and resiliency requirements, Seneca may recommend dual 1GbE ports in each server to support the IP SAN correctly.

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Having choices is a good thing usually and you have a few suggested here.

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